


that which is

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-30
Updated: 2012-05-30
Packaged: 2017-11-06 07:27:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/416264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Yusuf has flowers over Mal's grave.</p>
            </blockquote>





	that which is

Mal flings petals away like discarded toys, her face drawn in petulance. The moon above her wobbles from crescent to full too quickly to be read for meaning, as does everything else in this garden except Mal and the petals she holds (and even Mal is changing, has changed since you met her demure with primrose dangling in her hair). In this court she is the cereus, the Princess of the Night flowers: never mature enough, never responsible enough, you think, to have been the queen.

You are thirty-eight, but even in dreams you still build her imperfect and love her all the more for it.

\-- --

You are eight and the world shifts under your control. The world is yet confined to the anthills in your garden and the calcium spluttering itself out in the sand, but it grows. You are eighteen and your professors tell you that you could do anything. This declaration is yet confined to the drugs you have, the drugs you make, the euphoria of watching men sleep and rise again under you; you have yet to be twenty-eight. When you are twenty-eight, your world curls down into glances and restless fingers when Mal makes them and Mal has them.

So curious, our knowledge of ourselves. Even at twenty-eight you know that here is everything you will have only once— that, too, only for certain definitions of have.

At thirty you have her in the garden. Autumn distorts the flowers into limp shells, but of course Mal finds a perfect specimen to press against the hollow of your throat, its pink mirroring the stone in her wedding ring. She came without duenna or child. Yet she is never alone, even when she lies on a whim on the grass with her dress unfurling around her legs, as long as Dom Cobb can hold her in both of his hands.

It does not matter to you whether she is his sacrifice or whether she uses his affections as her own. Today she looks like cream and roast with her limbs loose in the grass. If you taste her, you are certain, you will devour both of yourselves in a bite.

So of course you take one. The blood in her neck rises so quickly under your eyes as she throws her head back to laugh. Mal's fingers are already eating your inhibitions anyways, five of them on your hip, two of them in your hair where curls meet ear. You wrap your hands around her waist in response. She doesn't protest when one moves upward along the curve of her breast, but why would she? Tonight she owns your movements and Mal always does what she wants.

"We're outside," you say. It is your last attempt to wrest control back.

"It doesn't matter, Yusuf, let them see," she says, and she pulls your closer hand to her nipple. You can feel the bumps on her skin when she pinches herself through your fingers, her nails slipping over yours. You can feel the heat of her thighs when she pushes your other hand downward and how can you think you're falling when you're already bent over her, close enough that she can kiss you without raising her head? Her lips are almost chaste under your chin for a moment, but she is never content with modesty. Her mouth presses hungrily at yours. You didn't even realize your mouth was open, but she possesses it now and it tastes like she wants to lick the life out of you, the delirium of her tongue hard against your cheek.

Mal covers the sound of her ripping her own dress open with her voice in your ear. Her accent should be illegal, it does such control-defying things with sibilants. Reason speaks to no listener; your name from her tongue brushing against soft skin is the only thing you hear. You try to say something back— maybe "Mal"— but all that comes out is the vowel in one long sigh when she pushes your thumb to her clit. The rest of your fingers follow quite naturally along the slick lines of her folds. She tugs at and under your briefs until your body screams at you to just fuck her, all else be damned.

Earlier tonight she licked at the anther of a four o'clock with her lips flushed the same pink as the wilting flower. She told you it was only for the taste, not, you thought, to taunt you with something you would have only once. You wish you could wilt away now but she holds you tight, ignoring the wet circle on your stomach, licking the underside of your cock. You would do anything to ease the guilt of fucking another man's wife but here you already are, crying against her, and he would have to kill you to stop you.

You are thirty. Or, you were, but the clarity of Mal arching her hips against your fingers, the look of your own come drying along her cheekbones, the bright pain of being inside her but knowing that it is she who insinuates herself in you— these are things Somnacin cannot reproduce, these are things that feel more real than memory can recreate.

"It's worth dying for in the summer, isn't it?" She waves a hand at the garden. "You keep beautiful flowers here."

"Yes," you say— it is all you can say while you look at her sprawling naked and assured. Mal the cereus is one of your keeping now too. You wish that you could forget about her imperfections, but you know every bloom hides a decaying thing. What draws you here? She comes to you by boredom but you cannot describe why you let her have you. Despite the control you have carefully cultivated— in your lab, in your dreams, in your deals— you love too much here. You give too much of yourself away to someone who will never return so much.

You are thirty-eight. You trample the dried petals and plant conifers and perennials over them.

\-- --

You are thirty-nine.

Dom Cobb thinks that Mal sleeps in his family's graveyard and lives in his head. This is true in a way. Love and pain and knowing are all in the mind, and you have been in his.

He nods at you, businesslike and unsuspecting, when you tell him you need his help to test chemicals. Why would he not? He thinks your lives never crossed until a week ago.

As you insert the PASIV line next to his sleeping form, the warehouse fades into the vista outside a window with fluttering white curtains. For a moment your heart flutters with it, afraid that you will see Cobb here after telling him his privacy would be respected. Moonflowers outside shake in the wind as though to reprimand you. Mal, her toes curled around their stems, waves at you with a small frown creasing her face, then she turns away and walks steadily toward the Cobbs' old house.

Cobb is not there. Cobb is never in the dreamscape when you drop into his dreams unannounced. After a while, observing his projection of Mal night after night, you draw conclusions. She floats through his dreams as a lovely ghost, softened into the curves of her kisses with her last lover. The Mal that Cobb wants to remember can never coexist with the edges lurking under the beauty of the one you know. Your subconscious mind recalls that she toyed with you as you might dangle yarn before your cats, and so you recall the unevenness of her teeth, the unease of the jokes made at others' expense, the time spent before a mirror tossing her hair this way and that while a job limped on without her. Your limbs tangled and your noses bumped on the one night she slept with a hand across your eyes.

You want her anyway. You want her even though Mal, the real Mal, lives in the negative spaces between your conception's and Cobb's, and your mind says too much _I don't know, I never knew why_ to call that elusive woman out of the silence.

\-- --

Dom Cobb thinks that Mal sleeps in his family's graveyard. This is true enough to satisfy everyone involved. He will probably kneel there in his nights and slowly learn to look for love again in his days. Mal doesn't have much say, but your paintbrush slides with little friction over her gravestone. The jasmine planted around it smelled so splendidly you couldn't resist adding a few more blooms to the stone yourself. You are no great artist but they will have to serve, as will the words:

Mal  
(Mallorie Cobb)

Because what else should you say?

\-- --

You are thirty-six. There is a great deal of talking.

Mal has already finished the thinking part. She has changed, too much to accept Cobb's reassurances, too moderate to not allow you a say. When she calls you for company, penned away from knives and pills, you give her weapons. This is easy. You point out incongruences in her memory (you know that people forget things in fifty years). You tell her that she feels hunted and torn not because of the uncertainty of dying (or because perhaps, perhaps she loves you a little and she always loved Dom Cobb) but because her world is calling. You tell her that she can't remember Philippa's teachers and James' cartoons because she made them up, because her subconscious isn't strong enough to devise details like that (her subconscious is the strongest you have ever touched). Her waking mind slots these things in; her death grows inside, leaving her thoughts bloated while she moves graceful as ever.

You didn't strangle her but you suffocated her, bit by bit, the tendrils of your arguments wrapping slowly around her jugular, and they twisted her up in all the right and wrong ways.

It is Cobb's fault that you have to do this. He enables Mal flirting with you, secure in his embrace, but not telling you that she is (was) only a friend. The lawyers detail requirement after requirement to ensure Cobb will fall with her. Usually you would listen, legalese no difficulty compared to reading your trade journals, but really you are done with listening and talking both. You don't know what you do and now you cease to care.

Cobb is devious enough in dreams. Out of them, he is so naive, letting Mal call you like this.

You are thirty-nine and he is still like this. He accepts that you are driven by money, which you will not deny. A man likes creature comforts and creatures to comfort. Not when one of your dreamers in Mombasa just fell to limbo and never came back, however, would you take his money as down payment on your life.

You watch him. Rather, since your agreement, you watch Arthur, you watch Eames, you watch Ariadne, you even watch Fischer with a cell phone nested over his shoulder, as Cobb makes them act. You have done this thing that you cannot explain. Your mind hates being so helpless. It concocts reasons detached from the bright bright feeling you get when you overhear Cobb discussing Mal as though she was only his. It takes facts and leads you like a prisoner to execution: You don't need (want) his money. You don't like (need) Cobb. You don't want (like) what you have done to Mal and to Cobb. You can't overturn it; returning him to Mal's children is up to all these people circling neatly around him while you retest finished chemicals.

You watch. Your mind built him a little devilish but he's only Dom Cobb in his worn jackets, almost sure that he will return from his last dream. You don't know whether you want what you feel to end anymore, so you smile and banter with everyone else, because that is easy.

This is hard: you think _she only heard what she wanted to hear, Cobb incepted her, no clear chain of causality, Mal was too intelligent for me to lead her astray._ You know she's dead.

One night you go under again. The Mal in your head looks up from where she lounges against a fence post and holds out a four o'clock to you. "We call these four o'clocks but they would open around seven," she says. "Late. Name the thing in you guilt, Yusuf, and a death-wish. You needn't be so confused."

Such a laconic mind you have when you are thirty-nine. The you that wears Mal's body only says "enough" when you come out of this inception, only visibly not shaking, only verbally uncertain where you want to go.

\-- --

You are forty, and both sets of jasmine curl over the Mal you grow in your garden.

You lean into the flowers and breathe her in.

**Author's Note:**

> Repost of this [fill](http://inception-kink.livejournal.com/19177.html?thread=44740585#t44740585).  
> All kinds of feedback, including concrit, are very welcome and appreciated!


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